No one person controls Microsoft. The board and the shareholders decide whether they want to have me as CEO.

There are several hundred people who stayed in the Ebola-affected countries and continued to do the work, put themselves at great risk because medical workers are the most likely to be infected because they're helping out when the person's health is deteriorating, including quite a bit of bleeding as they're getting very, very sick.

The thing about HD-DVD that is attractive to Microsoft is that it's very pro-consumer in letting you copy all movies up onto the hard disk.

I actually thought that it would be a little confusing during the same period of your life to be in one meeting when you're trying to make money, and then go to another meeting where you're giving it away. I mean is it gonna erode your ability, you know, to make money? Are you gonna somehow get confused about what you're trying to do?

There's a true schizophrenia where if you say to voters, you know, do you think the federal government spends too much money and they should spend less, they say yeah, absolutely. Then you name specific things, like Pell grants for students and they say, no, not that. How 'bout NIH, medical research funding? Nah, you really shouldn't cut that. And pretty soon you've proved that what the American public is against is arithmetic.

Here at work we're all just trying to get a job done. My people have the confidence of their convictions and they know their skills. And that occupies most of my time.

You can be a business thinker.